LinuxTag once again features the best and brightest among open source. More than 10,000 visitors are expected at the Berlin conference starting June 24 and running through June 27. Many free projects are exhibiting. Prizes and a press conference started things off.

LinuxTag 2009, meeting in the conference space under Berlin's famous radio tower, will have numerous project booths and an increasing number of talks. The Fedora FUDCon conference will run concurrently, along with numerous project workshops. Beside companies that get revenue from Linux, many free open source projects will be present. This would make the 15th annual LinuxTag.

The open source trade show launched with a keynote by co-organizer and Linux Magazin editor Nils Magnus. Linux Magazin editor-in-chief Jan Kleinert also gave out the second annual Univention Graduates Prize to promising students of open source.

At the opening press conference, Messe Berlin director Jens Heithecker announced that this year's conference will have 300 talks and that France will have an especially large participation with companies such as Linagora and Talend. The French Linux distribution Mandriva cancelled its visit last minute. Matthias Ettrich of Nokia/Qt admitted that more than 200 of his team were there. Even Nokia is no longer working on software behind closed doors, but "in fact, in public." External developers have the same status as internal ones, according to Nokia.

Another Messe Berlin event running concurrently with LinuxTag 2009 is IT Profits, whose main themes are virtualization and online marketing, with 50 talks given in two tracks over two days.